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CounterPunch
September
14 / 15, 2002
Notes for a
Future Historian:
The Bush
Administration Explained
by Ben Tripp
Mark Twain's significant other, Samuel Clemens,
once remarked that "Journalism is the first rough draft
of history." Not any more.
Someone else will have to take up the
skein of our time and weave it into the rich tapestry of days,
someone who with the mind's eye envisions the greater pattern
of history on the warp, and with the keen eye of nature picks
out the embroidery which will enliven our small corner on the
loom of ages, binding the weft and woof of circumstance and character
together. Or somebody who can knit.
Until that genius comes along, it will
have to be me, because I can do a fair running stitch--and it's
a good time to be running. I will seal these notes in a container
impervious to the elements, such as a sandwich bag, and place
them somewhere where they will not be discovered for a thousand
years. I'm thinking the front step of the George W. Bush Presidential
Library.
In the future, when Man has once again
risen from the mire to reclaim his place in the natural order
between the three-toed sloth and the walrus, people will want
to know: what happened to you guys in the beginning of the 21st
Century? And where are all the trees? I can help them with
the first question, by explaining modern events in language so
simple a child could read it to the President. The facts are
few and ever-changing, but I have drawn up a rough chronology:
It all started when George W. Bush (R--Texas),
upset over losing the election of 2000 to an earth-toned man,
set out to erase the legacy of the previous president, the moderate
Republican William Clinton. Clinton was a very wicked man indeed,
with a penis the size and shape of Florida, a comparison which
caused a great deal of trouble during the election as people
in Florida were afraid to touch anything, just in case it wasn't
Florida they were standing on. When Bush discovered that Clinton
had ingeniously left no legacy behind, he flew into a rage.
Unfortunately this would not be the last time someone flew into
something during this turbulent period.
Bush, who inherited the presidency from
his father, was accused of being the son of privilege, out of
touch with ordinary Americans (white men from Illinois) despite
superficial similarities such as a DUI offense and owning a baseball
team. He may have been a big phony, but Bush had real grit and
determination, even when things were going his way. For instance,
he attended both Harvard and Yale and got passing marks, even
though he could not read or talk. By this time he was 40, and
his mother, J. Edgar Hoover, threw him out of the house. Some
years later his friends got together and bought him a new house
in Washington, D.C., a suburb of the Military Industrial Complex.
When Al Gore, the President Elect, failed to show up for work,
Bush stepped into the breach. This is when the record begins
to get murky.
George W. Bush found himself nominal
leader of an angry, divided nation. Only the total absence of
opposition from the Democrats, a group of lobbyists for Americans
born without spines, enabled him to get anything done at all.
Luckily, Bush was surrounded by his very seasoned Administration,
mostly corporate leaders who knew what was coming and so left
the private sector (a suburb of the Military Industrial Complex).
With their wide range of expedience, these men (Condoleeza Rice)
developed plans to lift the burden of taxes and human rights
from the backs of their close circle of friends, based upon the
"trickle down" economic theory, as in "trickle
down Alan Greenspan's leg". Which it was soon to do.
Unfortunately popular opposition to many
of Bush's more ambitious plans meant he would have to proceed
with them anyway. So he did, but without a solid rationale that
would help obscure his actual purpose, to send the entire world
to Hell in a hand basket (a suburb of the Military Industrial
Complex). But a bizarre twist of Fate (the statue behind John
Ashcroft) suddenly gave Bush carte blanche to do whatever he
wanted-which is all he ever asked in the first place. Osama
Bin Laden, an old pal of Bush's father Manzanita Bush, was angry
about some old thing or other from back when Pops was running
the CIA (a popular nightclub on 47th Street in the days when
you could still get uncut cocaine from Columbia).
Something dreadful happened next; ask
someone else about it. Suffice it to say that Bush hit the trifecta:
1. The country needed a leader, and once
the Air Force let him out of the bunker, Bush was the guy with
" a leader" written on his lapel sticker, right under
the smiley face that says "Hi, I'm. . ." Fortified
with phenobarbitol, Bush started leading right away.
2. The media reset all previous issues
to zero, effectively erasing all memory of the Bush Administration's
troubles until that time, and gave him a ten-minute head-start
just to be sporting. Bush never looked back, nor did anyone
else.
3. War.
Some say Vice President Dick 'Nitroglycerine'
Cheney died of a heart attack (Charles Krauthammer) at about
this time, which might account for his increasingly erratic behavior.
In any case, Bush got whatever he asked for, in much the manner
to which he was accustomed. The Bill of Rights was removed from
the Constitution, making it shorter and thus more likely Bush
would someday read it---although with characteristic fortitude
he did nothing of the kind. Instead he directed the Legislative
Branch of the government (John 'Torquemada' Ashcroft) to start
rounding up evil doers. Only years later would we discover he
meant evil Dewars, a brand of Scotch he'd been drinking on Air
Force One that fateful day. Then someone with a phone book told
Bush the evil doers were Saudi Arabian, as was the mastermind
behind the whole thing, a homosexual cloth puppet named Bert.
All fingers and Bill Clinton's penis pointed directly at Saudi
Arabia. We immediately commenced bombing Afghanistan, due to
an outdated map. By a stroke of good fortune (not the one that
got Dick Cheney) Osama Bin Laden, Bert's "roommate",
was in that very country!
Here is where Bush's lucky streak ran
out. Someone forgot to latch the screen door and Bin Laden escaped,
despite billions of dollars worth of bombs cleverly disguised
as food aid packages. The war was declared won on points, which
was unsatisfactory to everyone the media wasn't asking. The
problem was that the war had been declared not on "Afghanistan",
which can be located simply by asking around, but on "Terror",
which has no fixed abode.
And then things got even worse. Bush,
who as noted took all the best corporate leaders for himself,
left American Business with nobody at the wheel (Kenneth Lay).
A series of corporate scandals and financial disasters followed
which rocked the entire world to its foundations, except the
stock market, which had no foundations and merely fell through
a hole in the earth's crust. But Bush was surrounded by his
team of experts, without whose help things might have improved
on their own; as it was, things got worse. Bush was directly
implicated in a variety of scandals, as was Dick 'Man of a Thousand
Faces' Cheney, who died of shame. And there were midterm elections
coming up, and everybody except the media was going crazy about
the economy (Paul Krugman).
Donald Rumsfeld, the famous wrestler,
had an idea one morning while Bush was reading "The Very
Hungry Caterpillar", a book on economics by Milton Friedman.
Bush was really just looking at the pictures, but the effect
was the same. Rumsfeld had a vision in his sleep in which he
saw Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein (played by Cheech Martin)
eating a piano which then turned into a plate of clams and began
singing the 'Toreador Song' from Bizet's opera 'Carmen'. At
last they had very real evidence that Saddam-Oh, look! Over
there, is that a giraffe? No? Ah, it was just a pangolin rearing
up on its hind legs, or a flower. . . What was I saying? Anyway.
Now all that remained was to convince
World Leaders that Saddam was indeed up to this very activity
and Iraq needed to be bombed flat again (a kind of family tradition
with the Bushes). Ariel Sharon, who owns a bulldozer rental
place in Israel, was all for it. Armed with a photograph of
a Wal-Mart being built in New Jersey, Bush convinced Tony Blair,
England's first female Prime Minister, to get on board for the
big win. The rest of the world-even Bush's favorite pal, Vlad
"Pooty-Poot" Putin, author of "The Very Hungry
Caterpillar", turned their backs on him. They blamed it
on everything: rejecting the World Court, scoffing at the Kyoto
treaty, violating the Nuclear Test Ban, calling Nelson Mandela
a "nignog"; but we all know what the real problem was:
they were jealous of our freedoms! This may partially explain
why these freedoms were taken away, to keep the Europeans from
breaking them 'accidentally on purpose' during recess. Somebody
did that to Bush once, at school: they broke the horn off his
bike, the one he liked to honk and honk and honk. He was so
tore up about it he barely got his MBA.
Spurned by Europe, Russia, Asia, Africa,
Australia, South America, Canada, and Robert Novak, Bush began
building consensus in the oil-rich nations of the Middle East,
lest he be accused of being all hat and no cartel. This process
is much like handing little photocopied notices to everybody
on your block that you're having a party with a live D.J. and
it may get pretty noisy, pretty late, so please don't call the
police. About the only country willing to talk the whole thing
over was Iraq. As if Bush didn't have enough troubles, however,
some nut, probably Colin Powell, started bombing Iraq without
telling anybody--just one of those slip-ups where someone asked
the bomber pilots where they were going with all those payloads
of smart bombs (Paul Wolfowitz) and they said "Oh, over
that way" and waved their hands vaguely Southeast, and the
next thing anybody knows we're bombing Iraq. Dick Cheney was
so shocked by this turn of events he died.
The one-year anniversary of Bush's trifecta
has recently passed, and all that had once looked so rosy for
his Administration now looks more like what you plant roses in.
That's all I know, so far, as nothing else has yet happened.
But I hope these little notes help future generations make sense
of this chaotic time. The rest, as they say, is history.
Ben Tripp
is a screenwriter. He can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net
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September
12, 2002
Paul de Rooij
A Glossary
of Occupation
James C.
Faris
Riefenstahl
at 100:
The Fascist Aesthetic
Gary Leupp
Presidential
Honesty on Iraq
Tarif Abboushi
A Conversation
with My Arab-American Self
Ron Jacobs
Shelter
from the Storm
Rick Giombetti
Paxil
and Addiction
Krystal Kyer
From NAFTA
to CAFTA
Another Rotten Trade Deal
John Jonik
Overcome
in Philly
September
11, 2002
Anis Shivani
How to
Survive in Ashcroft's America
Pierre Tristam
Abusing
the Sorrows of 9/11
David Krieger
Resisting
Bush's
"Relentless War"
Jerre Skog
9/11 One
Year Later:
Remember the Others, Too
Dave Marsh
Illegal
Music?
A Sampler's Delight
Norm Dixon
How the
Warmongers Have Exploited 9/11
September
7 / 8, 2002
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim
and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
September
6, 2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September
5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
George the Second
William Hughes
McKinney's
Defeat:
Undue Meddling
Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
Israeli Chief of Staff Calls Palestinians a "Cancerous Demographic
Threat"
Gary Leupp
Who's Afraid
of Iraq?
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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